Persistent Memory

Edmund Cage

Description:

Bio:

Almost certainly the maternal grandfather of Marian Elliot and ostensibly the paternal great-grandfather of Douglas Ryder, appears to have supernatural powers. Chief among those powers is the ability to be not dead despite nature’s best efforts. He apparently spoke to his valet using a full-length mirror well after his death, recruiting the fellow to aid in his resurrection. His time in Portland consisted of hopping from body to body, stealing artifacts and his relations’ blood, attempting to enact some ritual. Given that his final(?) words were, “I’m not ready!” it seems the ritual wasn’t finished.

..And then Douglas shot a brass head that was reciting German, breaking the chain.

Edmund’s background is a bit murky. Decidedly British, he relocated to America at some point in the past; his daughter is most definitely American. At some point he resided in San Francisco and went into business alongside Taylor and Taylor. His death… his death is one of those funny gaps in memory that Mariam experiences, but it was somewhere around the San Francisco earthquake.

According to Bartholomew Wright, Edmund’s valet and Miriam’s French tutor, Edmund began speaking to him using a full-length mirror in the Cage household, claiming he’d reunite Mr. Wright with his deceased daughter if he’d perform one small favor… enact a ritual in Portland to return him to a body. Specifically, the recently deceased Eugenia Taylor. For reasons that are currently unclear the ritual didn’t take and Eugenia’s corpse went off on its own way. It’s safe to assume that Zachary Primm was 1) fresh and 2) available, and thus he was the unlucky second attempt.

It’s presumed that Edmund Cage went to Morningside Sanitarium and, claiming kinship, removed the files of Douglas Ryder. If he was there in the first place, which he wasn’t, according to Douglas.

Cage next turned up as Benjamin Corbett at the Taylor estate auction, only to depart during the confusion and reenacted the ritual on the shores of the Willamette, hopping to the body of Phillip Pratchett. He then got himself “held for ransom” and tried to get an exchange set up at Riverview using some local thugs as patsies. In return for the safe release of ‘Philip’, Douglas Ryder was to give up some blood. Things went south and his flunkies unwittingly exposed his ruse, prompting him to kill them, advise Miriam to run, and flee the scene. (A curious bit about Cage’s behavior – he seems rather protective of our team despite also being a bloodthirsty undead murderous nutjob.)

Miriam was wounded in the exchange of gunfire and went to the hospital. While his granddaughter was sedated, Cage managed to extract some blood from her in the guise of a doctor. The hospital was politely and ineffectually apologetic.

Cage’s influence was next felt as Our Heroes went into the sewers near the site of the Corbett/Phillip body swap, where they ran into ‘Steve’ guarding a fresh body on ice and a rowboat from the Sellwood Bridge construction site. They also ran into Bartholomew Wright. Half-mad with what he’d seen and done and repulsed by the man he’d become, he explained what he knew. Before he could tell everything, though, a tentacle amulet about his neck throttled him to death and burrowed deep into his chest. (The center of the amulet, which looked at the time like a half-lidded eye, may have been the symbol of the Silver Twilight, come to think of it…)

Finally, through a series of coincidences(?) Our Heroes found Cage in the morgue of Legacy Good Samaritan, attempting to hop into the body of Dr. Arthur Bell with the forced assistance of Dr. Walter Boggs and the protection of one of the shadow-covered horrors seen in various locations. A well-placed shot interrupted the proceedings, and Cage’s soul has departed. Somewhere.